I “found myself” in Erik Davis’s column, “Doom Scroll.”
I have been pulling back on media. No TV news, only reading… and now? Often just reading the headlines. Because the media walks me into a living hell.
Later in the day I participate in conversations that start on a high note only to trail into “informed” doom. But what good are these informed conversations? Talk’s cheap.
I am trying to be a responsible citizen. I just wish the media moguls would join me.
Vicki
Doom Scroll
Erik Davis
As far as I can make out, the term “doomscrolling” started making the rounds in 2019, and became, for obvious reasons, far more infectious in 2020. We’ve had two more years of pandemic, and a yearish of whatever this next thing we are in is, and the term does not seem to be losing much luster. (…)
I suspect you know it well: whether over breakfast or on the metro or during a procrastination break at work, you dip into your newsfeed, which is largely distressing of course, but you keep at it, heading deeper into the gloom. You might start out with some of that old-school newspaper-reader attitude, a mix of curiosity and responsibility and self-concern, under which lies a more basic and unspoken mimetic impulse to keep up with the pressing narratives of a group, a region, a nation, a species. But then the bottom drops out, and the feed starts to feed on you. The number, scale, and wickedness of the problems served up by crisis media—wicked not only in the sense of being nasty and often nefarious, but of being hairy beyond all possible resolve, and therefore ripe for dissension—rears up like, well, a wicked monster, consuming hope, potential, and whatever modicum of feel-good you started your sesh with. (…)
